NAVIGATING GLOBAL REGULATORY FRAGMENTATION
R&C: How can organisations design compliance frameworks that remain agile amid rapidly shifting geopolitical and trade dynamics?
Wellens: A volatile geopolitical situation will mostly impact trade compliance and export control, expand lists with sanctioned entities, increase licence requirements, and hamper exporting certain technologies. But it will also restrict cross-border flows for national security reasons, lead to increased cyber attacks and espionage, see governments impose additional security requirements on critical infrastructure, and increase bribery risk and pressure to win contracts in more difficult markets. Multinational companies cannot manually manage compliance risks effectively in these volatile times. The technology solutions used within compliance should easily be customisable to new sanction lists, licensing requirements and stricter payment controls. Contract management systems should be ‘searchable’ so that immediately those contracts affected by localisation laws or stricter security standards can be identified and contract clauses can rapidly be adapted. Rather than having myriad exceptions on company policies, companies might want to go for the stricter standard across all regions and establish more dynamic and more frequent risk assessments. An annual risk assessment is no longer good enough.
Belov: An organisation’s compliance framework or programme should be tailored to its risk profile, include real-time intelligence and involve cross-functional coordination. Changes in the geopolitical landscape, as well as regulatory enforcement trends, including trade, can result in changes to that risk profile. It is therefore critical to have a robust compliance risk assessment process that is routinely updated to keep pace with market dynamics and regulatory changes, and used to identify opportunities to make agile enhancements to the compliance programme.
Apr-Jun 2026 Issue
BDO
Ethics and Compliance Switzerland
Siemens